A large portion of the printing art relates to the formation of a painted image on a plane surface such as paper and the like as it is held against a flat or curved backing. The art has employed resilient rubber surfaces to paint a design or letters on irregular surfaces such as corrugated cardboard as illustrated by the Harbison U.S. Pat. No. 2,014,043 and the Jones U.S. Pat. No. 2,893,320. In both of these patents a soft rubber printing surface is used to print a complete design upon an irregular receiving surface, such as corrugated paper, calicoes, cotton cloth and cardboard. Block printing machines have been employed in the past to print soft fabrics and other materials as illustrated by Herr U.S. Pat. No. 2,735,653. Animations are printing using resilient foamed plastic blocks, in Bubert U.S. Pat. No. 2,684,012 but the images are placed on a solid or firm planar surface.
Heretofore, needle-point printing, that is, the formation of a colorcode image of a design on needle-point canvas has been accomplished by tedious, time consuming and expensive hand painting. Each square or piece of needle-point is laboriously completed by hand. The costs of the completed canvases are high as a result and consequently, this art or hobby is not open to everyone. Hot stamping and silk screening methods are also used. In the former process only three or four copies can be made from an original as the image becomes progressively more faint, the latter process is expensive and there is a problem of excess paint spoiling the design. Regardless of cost, these processes do not always produce a sharp line of demarcation between the different colors along diagonals or along the edges or cover the threads well. Consequently, although the completed canvases are expensive they do not always have sales appeal. Another drawback is that the canvas is not oriented or squared during the application of the design and the finished design after sewing of the proper colors of yarn thereon becomes distorted when applied and stretched as an upholstery cover or other display.